LESLIE: Bill in Tennessee is on the line with a painting question. How can we help you?
BILL: My house faces east and of course, you get the west – the sunset in the back of my house. But that sun really pounds down hard on my house and I’ve got wood windows and I’ve got a stained, wood front door. My question is: would I get any benefit to – I need to – I want to scrape the windows down and repaint them. Would I get any benefit to putting an exterior KILZ-type product on there before I paint it?
TOM: Yeah, I mean you always get a benefit from priming the wood, which is what you’re talking about doing. So, sure, especially if you’ve got loose paint, you want to scrape it down, sand it down, get rid of everything that’s loose, then prime it. If you want to really do a terrific job, I would use an oil-based primer and that’s going to soak in and seal and make sure everything is nice and tight and attached to the wood fibers. Then you put your topcoat on top of that, of paint.
So priming is always a good idea and KILZ is a terrific product to do that with.
BILL: OK. Now, let me ask you about the stained wood door. What kind of product would you recommend to kind of seal that in?
TOM: So the door is stained right now? Does it have any kind of gloss finish on it?
BILL: No. It’s kind of a walnut-type color.
TOM: But it has no urethane-type finish on it? You think it was just stained?
BILL: Well, it’s about – the house was built in ’06, so it’s a couple years old. It’s faded out a little bit. There may have been one there on there at one time but it’s …
TOM: Well, here’s why I ask. If the wood door has never had any stain – never had any finish on – a topcoat of finish on it, then you could just restain it. And so if you restain it – and again, if you sand it down, rough it up and then restain it, you should be able to get a very rich tone. But then what you do need to do is put a urethane on top of that. Use an exterior urethane because it has UV protection in it. And take the door off the hinges to do all the work, set it up on a couple sawhorses in your front yard or your garage and then work on it there.
If the door has already got a finish on it, then you may have to sand it down through that finish to get to the raw wood in order to restain it.
BILL: Great. Well, I appreciate it.
TOM: You’re very welcome. Thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.
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